Miami’s Innovative Post Office Helps Boost Real Estate
MIAMI — Early land developers in Arizona had to be ingenious when it came to selling real estate. Here’s an example, taken from A History of the Miami Area
“No institution in Miami had a more colorful career than the Miami Post Office…In December 1909, the post office was located in a little green frame building that could be hauled on a truck. The idea of putting the post office on wheels was originated by Mr. Van Dyke and Mr. Prochaska. They would station it at one corner and sell all the surrounding lots. When the cleanup was made, they would move the mobile post office to another corner and proceed to sell the lots in that section of town. It was a novel idea in peddling real estate, as all buyers wanted property close to the post office.”
I was working near Happy Jack, renovating a campground at Clint’s Well, during the fall and winter of 1983 and 1984. The Happy Jack Post Office was also a shed-like building on a trailer at that time. Sometime around then, folks in the area were commenting about Happy Jack “moving up the road” when the Post Office was towed a few miles down the road to the gas station near Clint’s Well. I seem to remember some incident at the time where someone tried to steal the Post Office from the gas station with their pickup truck, but didn’t get very far down the road with that prank. Life in these small towns can be more exciting than you might think sometimes.